Satsangs

Satsang is a compound Sanskrit word that means “keeping the company of the Self.” The Self, Awareness, is the true nature of everyone and one keeps company with it by continually meditating on it in many ways. One of the most effective methods involves discussing non-dual teachings with someone who has realized his or her identity as the Self, to get clarity with reference to Self inquiry. The satsangs posted here are the questions of many people around the world who are interested in enlightenment and find that Vedanta is their preferred means of Self knowledge. Since I am a teacher of Vedanta, a time tested means of self inquiry, I am qualified to reply to these questions.~James Swartz

ShiningWorld Reader

Ram: Dear
Arthur, we’re sorry to hear that the relationship with Mary
didn’t work out, although we’re not surprised. I won’t
commiserate further: I assume that you’d like our take on the
situation.

Those
pesky vasanas!
Well, you can’t blame the vasanas,
so let’s look deeper. Forgive me if I state the obvious here and
there. Self-inquiry is always about the why. In this case, why
does Arthur fall in love (emphasis on “fall”) and long for a
non-dual relationship? The short answer, which is always the best,
is: Arthur doesn’t esteem/love himself enough to be happy with
himself. If you love yourself as you should, you will have to carry a
club to beat the women off, believe me. We won’t go back to
childhood to explain the origin of the feeling of lovelessness; it
gets us nowhere.

If
you don’t appreciate yourself as the love that you seek, you seek
it in another. The irony is that what you seek in another you always
have in the form of yourself, insofar as you only want the other
because it puts you in touch with yourself. You know that looking for
love in a relationship doesn’t work. I know it doesn’t work.
Scripture says it doesn’t work. World literature says it doesn’t
work. Why? Because you are what you are seeking. But it is clear that
this fact is not known by you in such a way that it neutralizes the
desire for love (from a woman). We hope that this knowledge becomes
hard and fast at some point but whether or not it does is up to
Isvara
so let’s consider two more options.

In
this option we throw the hungry vasana-dog
a bone. It is based on the idea that the kind of love you seek is out
there waiting for you but the way you are going about it is
inappropriate and untimely (remember svadharma,
appropriate and timely action?). It is difficult to talk about this
problem because the ego may very well beg to differ and it may get
irritated at me for saying it. But, just as Krishna was not
particularly warm and fuzzy with Arjuna in the beginning, I will
state the (probably unwelcome) obvious: she was half your age,
Arthur. And she was from a different culture and you met her at a
satsang
which means that she is confused as to her purpose in life (i.e.
moksa
or a relationship) as you are.

Putting
two confused people looking for love together does not remove the
confusion nor does it equal love. To state the obvious again: nobody
wants a relationship for moksa.
Well, maybe moksa
from loneliness, but freed from loneliness is not moksa.
Freedom from self-ignorance is moksa.
So for option two to work I’d say you need to get a bit more
realistic. Choose a woman who is in the same karmic
boat. She may not have a nice tight ass, her breasts may not be quite
as pert and a few wrinkles may have appeared (nothing that can’t be
more or less rectified by modern cosmetic science, however) but the
chances of making it work increase exponentially insofar as the
competition is not as fierce and women of a certain age are usually
attracted to men of a certain age insofar as they are looking for
companionship and not excitement, which, believe me is more rewarding
than you may imagine. If you want a spiritual type, which is not
always the best, you will find a reasonably significant cohort
available in the spiritual world.

Secondly,
a bit of advice from someone who has had a fair amount of success
with the ladies: Don’t wear your heart on your sleeve. It’s best
to maintain – at least outwardly – an obvious sense of
indifference. The needier you are, the more likely you are to get a
needy partner which does not bode well for happiness. Option two more
or less requires you to pay lip service to your spiritual desire and
set your heart on your goal: a relationship! A woman! You should do
well. You are good-looking, very smart, well-mannered and, dare I say
it (don’t discount this fact), well-to-do, maybe rich. It goes a
long way with the over-50 crowd. And when Ms. Right shows up, you do
the relationship as karma
yoga. Relationships can be useful
spiritually, as the energy you formerly spent hunting can be
profitably invested in higher pursuits.

Option
three: man up! Commit yourself to moksa
as defined by Vedanta and make a vow to stand up to that fucking
fucking-vasana
until it really dies. Make a binding contract with yourself. No
dating for one year, to be extended if necessary. When you see a
skirt walking by avert your eyes; don’t let the fantasies take
root.

Forgive
me for being honest – I hate this bad-cop role – but you are
trying to have your cake and eat it too, Arthur. It doesn’t work.
If you want a relationship, go for it and forget the moksa
business. Wallow in them until you are completely convinced they
don’t work, and the dispassion conducive to moksa
arises. It seems you are not quite convinced that relationship-love
is a dead-end street. If you think about your recent foray you will
realize that even when it was good, you were still alone. Vedanta
calls your situation lack of purushartha
nischaya, clarity with reference to
what you want.

The
final option is to see that there is a problem in the first place.
Read your letter again and ask yourself if Arthur was the only one
there when Arthur wrote it. When Sundari read it to me I thought,
“WTF, the self is writing this.” The clarity, Arthur. The
knowledge. The only thing that alerted me to the problem was that
Arthur was not laughing. See if the one watching Arthur read these
stern words from big brother Ramji isn’t the same one who was there
watching Arthur pen that tale of hardship and woe.

~ Much
love, Ram

Arthur: Dear
Ramji, thanks for this cogent response and sound advice. There was
nary a ruffle emotionally or for my ego as I read it, but just a
sense of increased clarity and an appreciation for your directness.
Well – maybe – the “not-so-mighty Arjuna” part stung a
little. ☺ I had to laugh, and still laugh when I recall that you wrote “fucking
fucking-vasana,”
or FFV, as I will forever call it… Yup, FFV…

Looking
at the whole relationship thing again, with reference to what you
wrote, I realize that it is in that moment where I let fantasy take
root – whether it be the fantasy of a fling or the fantasy of a
“lived happily ever after” story, or the fantasy of fulfillment
through ownership of a desired object – that I start to skid off
the road to moksa.
And in reflecting on this a bit further, in this moment, this
“fantasy” can just as well be called a “craving” or a
“desire” –‐ this is the form in which craving or desire is
the most potent for me – and I can see, in my moments of clarity,
that it is the tension or agitation produced by this fantasy that “I”
think will be resolved by gaining the object. But Vedanta/Yoga 101
tells me that “joy is not in the object” and, further, that it is
in the cessation of craving (fantasy) that the joy
that is already there is uncovered. So clearly it’s just more
intelligent and efficient to let go of the craving at the outset and
to uncover the ever-present joy rather than have it drive one to
spend many months of effort and thousands of dollars on gifts,
travel, living in a foreign country for a month at a time, writing
long love letters professing eternal love, having hour-long Skype
chats, etc. only to arrive without the object on the other side of
it. Now THAT is funny and I am laughing at this moment!

There
is one thing that eludes me: This esteem/love for myself. Maybe it’s
just a matter of semantics, or maybe I’m tripping on the similarity
between this concept of “self-esteem/self-love” and all of the
psychobabble crap that uses the same terminology but which is somehow
more focused on an appreciation of the “person” than it is on a
wider sense of being. The truth is that if “self-esteem” is the
appreciation of this “person,” I must say that it’s kind of
hard to love something that is so mutable and clearly evanescent and
which, in the wider context of “reality,” seems to be so
superficial. So is this “self esteem/love” that you refer to the
same as the sense “I am whole and complete”? Or is that an
important part of it but, beyond that, perhaps you are pointing at a
more accepting embrace of my “person”? That’s the sticking
point for me right now. Seeing the way that I am driven to activity
by raga/dvesa,
and how foolish that way of living is, I would just as soon
dissociate myself with this “person.”

~ With
love, Arthur

James:
I love you, Art. You’re the best, an Ocean of Mercy. With your (as
always) eloquent letter you relieved the anxiety I felt the moment I
wrote “not-so-mighty.” I thought, “Have I gone too far?
Will he still love me?” One more true confession so I can sleep at
night: when you went for Sally last October, I looked at Sundari,
rolled my divine eyes and said, “Six months, max!” We had a good
laugh.

So,
knowledge assimilated. You get a B+ on this lesson. Why not an A?
Because you failed to confidently answer the last question: self-esteem/love is love of Self or love of self? And the answer: love of self. And why were you not completely confident with that
idea? Answer: the old raja/dwesas
once again! Or the FDV (fucking dwesha
vasana). You dislike that needy
little fucker named Art.

He
needs your love, the poor sod. He will always be what he is. Isvara
is the key. Art, Ramji, etc. did not create themselves. We come in
with an upside and downside. We can’t take credit for either. If
you take credit for the upside you become inflated (arrogant/vain),
if for the downside, deflated (low self-esteem/love).

If
you give birth to a difficult child, you don’t get pissed off at
the child because you understand that he or she can’t help being
that way. So you love it. Your love makes the child acceptable in its
own eyes and it can love itself. This child never dies. It is
eternal. When you are old and grey, that child is still present. The
longer you withhold the love, the more it suffers. You can’t count
on Mom and Pop anymore – they did their bit, for better or worse.
It is up to you to love your self. Because we call it a “not-self”
does not mean that it is meant to be an object of aversion. It just
brings to mind the other Self, the real you, whose nature is love.
The love you felt for Sally needs to go to you first. If it goes to
you, nobody can resist you. You won’t have to spend a dime to get
the girl. No flowers, no inspired love letters, no humiliating
compromises. She will be all over you.

So
maybe the vow should be: “I will love Art every minute of the day. I
will not judge him. I will accept him, warts and all. He is forgiven.”

~ Love,
Ramji

Arthur: Dear
James, your reply has really gotten me to have a sober look at my
inner sense of self-worth (or lack thereof) and how that manifests
as the FDV. After I received your email, and considered whether or
not I did/could love this “needy little fucker” Art, I was
actually quite surprised to see something inside of myself that
looks/feels like self-loathing. What a shock! So it’s timely and
of vital importance that I understand what the heck is going on here.

Where I
have gotten to so far is to ask myself, “What’s stopping you from
loving that ‘needy little fucker’ inside?” and, “What does
Ramji mean by FDV as it applies to the aversion to myself?” What
seems to be the case for me is that I can’t simply “will”
myself to love myself, as much as I want to do that. So the tack that
I am taking now is to use my intellect and what I understand from
Vedanta to dig myself out of this apparently deep hole that I have
been in for my whole life. Can you let me know if this makes sense?

Part of
the reason that I am taking this approach is that I have been so
inspired from my recent study of Bhagavad
Gita chapters 13 and 14. Between your
recordings on these chapters and Swami D’s home-study course on
these topics, I have come to see how powerful these teachings are in
helping me to achieve a high degree of objectivity, and of course to
see how that objectivity exposes the Subject. More practically, the
process goes like this for me:

• There
is no doer (karta),
only the play of the gunas
and the witness of this play of the gunas
is me (atma);

• For
my purposes in this analysis, I take the essential nature of sattva
as illumination/clarity/joy, of rajas,
longing/restlessness, and of tamas,
apathy/sloth/delusion;

• “I”
am guna-atita,
beyond the gunas.
Therefore to the degree that I am able to see my momentary state
as an expression of one guna
or another, to that degree I am already beyond the guna
that is manifesting at the moment. So in this simple application of
knowledge, I assert my identity with the self.

This is
an experiment that is currently in progress, but the first fruits are
becoming evident. So if I feel “longing” or a sense of
“neediness” (they really are the same thing) as I have been, I
can just take it as a “rajoguna cloud” manifesting in that moment
rather than something that either identifies “me” with this
“needy little fucker” and know that it will pass. And along with
this, I tell myself, “Of what use is aversion here? It’s just the
play of rajoguna.” In the same way, and because I am
doing this work now this happens more frequently, if I see a sudden
and uncaused upwelling of joy and peace, I can also take that as a
“sattva-guna cloud” passing and tell myself, “Of
what use is taking credit for this or expecting it to last?” And as
for self-loathing, which is really just, if I understand it
correctly, the dwesha
vasana asserting itself, it seems to make
sense to treat that as an expression of rajoguna, but on this point I am not clear. Is
aversion like this just another facet of rajoguna or is it something orthogonal? In any
case, it appears that if I just objectify this loathing, now that I
am more aware of it, I can see it as something that will pass as
well, and as not me.

So I am
kinda sidestepping this whole “self-loathing” thing, with the
exception of seeing it as just another object in my awareness, but my
hope is that once enough clarity develops that the self-loathing
will just evaporate. And of course I can still make efforts to love
myself whenever I catch this movement in my mind. Bottom line:
Vedanta rocks! And if there is anything faulty or missing in my
reasoning or process I would certainly appreciate some clarification. I love
you too, Ramji.

~ Art

Ram: Dear
Art, your thinking is a perfect example of self-inquiry, “taking
a stand in awareness.” You understand the guna
teaching well. The idea is to “sidestep” the self-loathing, see
it as an object belonging to ignorance and not to you, the seer. It
is something that motivates certain actions but not every action. In
short, it comes and goes. So it isn’t real. If you can’t maintain
that objectivity and rajoguna
causes Art to act, then Art should apply the karma
yoga logic. In the case of
relationships, there is nothing inherently unspiritual about one
unless it is accompanied by the belief that it will complete you. The
only problem with the Sally thing was Art’s inability to turn the
result over to Isvara,
hence the grief once it ended. Rajas-inspired
love is so compelling that one wants to lock it up and keep it tucked
away forever. But no one can lock it up. It is fleeting.

If
you consistently apply the guna
teaching – the feelings and thoughts always only belong to the
guna,
not to the self – the self-loathing will slowly fade as rajas
loses its power. What you said about not being able to will yourself
to love yourself is indeed wise. Love only flowers when it is watered
by understanding. As I believe I mentioned, whatever is, is not the
result of conscious choices made by Art.

Ignorance
made him do it. Desire made him do it. Fear made him do it.
Understanding this fact is forgiveness, and love flowers in the
waters of forgiveness. When I see you, I don’t see your past. I see
atma
shining. When you see me, you don’t see my past, you see atma
shining. The trick is for you to see atma
in you and me to see atma
in me. All the thoughts, the history, etc. are not real. They have
nothing to do with you or me.

You
are on the right track, Art. Keep at it.

~ Love,
James

Contacting Shining World

For years I have happily and diligently responded to communications on the topic of Self realization. Since the publication of my book, “How to Attain Enlightenment”— currently in its third printing —and the success of this website, the volume of emails has increased considerably. Unfortunately, owing to a busy schedule of teaching and writing, I am no longer able to answer all the emails I receive in a timely fashion. However, my wife, who is also a teacher, and several well-qualified teachers we have endorsed are available to answer emails on my behalf. I encourage you to send them your questions.
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